Lionsgate is hungry

With the success of the TWILIGHT franchise, studios are scrambling to find that next young-adult literary series that might result in a tentpole franchise. Lionsgate is putting its money on Suzanne Collins' futuristic novel "The Hunger Games", the first in a trilogy set in a society in which "districts" pay tribute in the form of a teenage boy and girl who are forced to fight to the death on live TV. Young-adult? Sounds more like masochistic pervert.

Collins will adapt her own novel, which has spent 25 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Lionsgate is already the proprietor of the TWILIGHT series, so I'm sure it couldn't have hurt that TWILIGHT author Stephenie Meyer has praised "The Hunger Games". The second installment, "Catching Fire," is due out in September. This film kind of sounds like BATTLE ROYALE, the vicious Japanese film in which the government captures a class of ninth-grade students and forces them to kill each other on an island for sport. Unfortunately, the words "young" and "adult" that are consistently being tied to "The Hunger Games", lead me to believe that we are in store for something a lot tamer. Boo.